One is Wiio’s laws: “Communication usually fails, except by accident.” Osmo Wiio, a Finnish journalist and member of parliament, coined several laws of communication, including:
“If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.”
“The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.”
“In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be.”
Wiio made these laws in the era of carefully hand-written letters. Multiply them by 10 in the emoji and social media intern era.
IOW, communicating the vast changes being attempted is complicated beyond most folks understanding, making it easy to go off the rails. And, it's Trump who's not apparently on any rail other than his own. I could elaborate further but no one would understand.
"I would wager against success.".... #MeToo. I'd give an over/under on the wager, but I still don't know what over/under means.
Excellent observations, including "The problem is not that liberalism fails. It is that the people who claim to be liberals, once in power, lose their taste for liberalism. The challenge is to set up systems that are robust to this tendency."
I was a lifelong Democrat until about six years ago when I saw progressives who were trying to "save" Democracy subverting Democracy
What those progressives (a misnomer) mean by "saving our Democracy" appears to be nothing other than saving their technocratic power, their bureaucracy by any means, fair or foul. Their machinations have deprived them of any claim to legitimacy but they are either unaware of this or indifferent to it. "Ecrasez l'Infame!"
Defining Trump's mission from his perspective: "Me." Mr. Trump allegedly wants to make America great, but this is only so long as he is perceived as great. Don't get me wrong, a few of his objectives are, in themselves, very good (controlling the border). But fundamentally he's about himself, his legacy, being in the spotlight constantly, etc. His flip-flop on the union illustrates his whim.
With the way Trump immediately capitulated yesterday to arguably the worst union in the country over the dock automation that we desperately need to regain competitiveness with China, with possibly the dumbest excuse for reasoning ever, I think we have our answer.
Maybe there will still be net positives in the end given just how abysmal the Democrats have been the past decade in attacking US dynamism with self inflicted wounds, but it won’t be by better principles on behalf of Trump so much as him just not paying attention.
This is a fairly pessimistic post, and I’m fine with that. I’m still grateful that Trump won, and that DEI is on the defensive. This gives us breathing room. The question I should consider is, “What am I going to do with this breathing room that will improve things in the longterm?”
“However, as N.S. Lyons points out, most of these enemies are in the private sector, especially universities, and many are very well-funded by non-profit giants.“ Most universities are public. See Vedder’s article, “There Are Really Almost No Truly Private Universities.”
"I have my doubts that Mr. Trump is up for carrying out the crusade that Lyons and others are hoping for."
I'm much more pessimistic than you are. I've never believed that Trump has much in the way of concrete objectives, and even less appreciation for how to use the government bureaucracy to accomplish things. He does seem to be recruiting some people with objectives, but most of them have little or no experience in working in large organizations. He may do less damage than Harris would have done, but I don't expect much in the way of achievements.
A laudatory change would be that no one in the executive branch has job protection of any kind- when the President changes he or she has the power to replace every single member that works for the executive branch.
Remember, there was a reason for creation of the civil service - all government jobs were filled by partisans, giving them out to their friends and family. This was not only policy makers and implementers - there weren't very many policies to make or implement through the federal bureaucracy. It included ladies sweeping the floors, men delivering the mail, collectors of taxes, etc. A much bigger problem at the state and municipal level, where it included police, building inspectors, road construction, you name it.
I've often wondered how differently things would have turned out if the civil service had never been invented. I don't think things would be any worse as far as the deep state goes, but would they be any better? It would probably be just a different kind of untameable swamp.
Whenever I see “liberalism” bandied about, I think of the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/#ClaLib and wonder. But then great minds like Furedi, Rufo, and Lyons pull me back to reality. Pragmatically, they seem to be asking the same question, “how?” Or as the early Russian radicals might have phrased it “What is to be done?”
Furedi gets to the root of the matter:
“It is important to understand that the politicisation of the Courts violates a founding principle of democracy – liberal democracy, social democracy, Christian democracy are founded upon the principal that law and politics must be kept as far from each other as possible. What we have today is not simply the case of a traditional judicial over-reach but a situation where the rule of law is systematically deployed to serve political end.” The new administration will be in an all out war with the lawfarists. And the lawfarists are well supplied with ambiguous statutory ammunition to delay and thwart any attempt at progress.
How to win? Repeal the statutes.
Rufo’s head is in the right place and there is nothing wrong with his proposed strategy, however, it seems like just mowing the lawn to make the weeds less obvious. The weeds have to be pulled out by the roots. I would suggest considering adding to his strategy issuing an OMB requirement for each government agency or other body to submit a list of each of the statutes under which the agency has ever promulgated a regulation and the most significant regulations issued under each. The first budget the administration presents to Congress should include legislative proposals to repeal the underlying statute for every harmful regulation. No deregulation without statutory repeals or else it is all just temporary and the lawfarists still have their weapons to fight progress.
Lyons gets to the practicality of it all. I must admit I am dismayed when I see Vivek and Joni Ernst prattling on about all the stupid research grants awarded. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. Democratic Senator William Proxmire highlighted such waste for decades with his “Golden Fleece” awards and it never did a lick of good. I’ll be impressed when DOGE comes up a proposal to abolish the underlying statute that enabled those awards. Perhaps it is worthwhile to propose and enact legislative requirements for automatic statutory and regulatory expiry dates. At least no new regulation should be promulgated without an expiry date. The real work is going to be done in Congress. And that is where JD Vance needs to step up and prove himself. If Vance is unable to get Congress to move on a repeal agenda, then Trump needs to find someone who can make it happen. So far, it is a good sign that Vance is out of the news. He needs to be working quietly across the whole of Congress.
More practically, the upcoming expiry of certain tax provisions offers an opportunity to make radical change in the tax code and an opportunity to undertake massive deregulation via statutory repeal. There have been a lot of proposals floating around. For my two cents, just repealing the entire US tax code and replacing it with an adaptation of Singapore’s Goods and Services Tax would be ideal. And it would effectively serve the same purpose as the proposed tariff hikes.
So, “revive liberty” seems a bit nebulous as a measure of success. I think its pretty easy to see where that is going: Trump is not ideologically pure and will be a disappointment regardless. If I, on the other hand, had to suggest just one measure of whether Trump is succeeding or not, it would be real median household income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N Maybe there is a better single economic indicator of the nation’s welfare? If so, I would gladly use that.
Behold! The hidden challenge that makes this all more difficult is that people who do not have intensive training in statistics are *terrible* at properly making good decisions where the probability of an adverse outcome is low, but the consequences of that adverse outcome are high.
At the same time, the intensively trained statisticians are *terrible* at properly making decisions on a human's behalf when the probability of success is low, even if the consequences of that successful outcome are extremely positive.
Any discussion of Liberalism with engaging with Communitarianism is necessarily superficial and will fail to engage with the relevant issues substantively.
Liberalism has failed, a bit, because its goal of individual freedom is not constrained by liberalism— it’s been hugely and wonderfully successful in Christian cultures. Because the Christian culture, Under God, has put constraints on individual behavior so as allow maximum freedom in actions that do not cause social harm. Harm to society.
Along with competition, adversarial Justice, and scientific disputes, a key pillar of Liberalism is Rule of Law. Like Democrats so often mentioned BUT those Dem elites so often flagrantly violated. It was Christian culture, not Liberalism, that constrained Expressive Individualism (phrase from Robbie George, the only known conservative professor at Princeton.)
Kling says something like “The problem is not that communism fails. It is that the people who claim to be communists, once in power, lose their taste for communism.” Most Americans know that this is dumb, tho a huge number of professors, even today, would claim that “real communism hasn’t been tried.” Kling is sort of claiming real Liberalism hasn’t been tried, and many Europeans call themselves Classical Liberals rather than the US term Libertarian. (As I was in the 80s).
The Liberal project of replacing a Culture, like our Christian culture, with thousands of laws & regulations, is a failure. If Liberals in power lose their taste for Liberalism, as they have in most OECD countries, then it shows that Liberalism fails. Because of big government, full of Liberals, preferring their own individual agenda rather than the jobs they were given power to do.
The Principal Agent problem. Which Milei in Argentina is hugely reducing by getting rid of many govt bureaucrats and regulations. So there’s hope for Trump, Musk, & Ramaswamy. Especially if they get govt employees to be limited to 8 years in govt, except the military.
I think your notion of liberalism is too broad. Not all questions of law are supposed to be open to change by the democratic process; that's why we have a constitution and a bill of rights. But since the New Deal, important parts of the Constitution are being disobeyed with impunity. This must stop even if it brings down the country to stop it.
What's wrong is, approximately, the very existence of administrative law and the jobs of the so-called experts who administer it.
Trump is patriots' last, best hope to get this problem fixed permanently. If he can't, then we're hosed unless and until the right dictator saves us.
Liberals, meaning classical liberals, were largely in charge in the US for more than 150 years until the Depression. Acemoglu should recognize that those liberals governed successfully. The New Deal brought a different cast of characters, who I would call "progressives."
My question is: does a truly liberal democracy always risk the pitfalls of a Depression and/or progressive takeover?
The Progressives began after the Civil War showed government could do what ordinary people hadn't done -- end slavery. It really got going in the 1880s. Railroad regulation, meat packers, occupational licensing, especially doctors and lawyers, but also plumbers and other fields. The Fed and income tax in 1913, the steel navy revival in the 1880s, lots and lots of statists grabbing for power.
Let me re-state my thought: the Progressives-statists became dominant with the New Deal and that was a decisive turning point. The Harding-Coolidge-Hoover administrations reversed much of Wilson's progressive policies, such as railroad nationalization.
Wow. Good one today. So many thoughts.....
One is Wiio’s laws: “Communication usually fails, except by accident.” Osmo Wiio, a Finnish journalist and member of parliament, coined several laws of communication, including:
“If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.”
“The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.”
“In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be.”
Wiio made these laws in the era of carefully hand-written letters. Multiply them by 10 in the emoji and social media intern era.
IOW, communicating the vast changes being attempted is complicated beyond most folks understanding, making it easy to go off the rails. And, it's Trump who's not apparently on any rail other than his own. I could elaborate further but no one would understand.
"I would wager against success.".... #MeToo. I'd give an over/under on the wager, but I still don't know what over/under means.
"I'd give an over/under on the wager, but I still don't know what over/under means."
LOL. Glad I'm not the only one...
Excellent observations, including "The problem is not that liberalism fails. It is that the people who claim to be liberals, once in power, lose their taste for liberalism. The challenge is to set up systems that are robust to this tendency."
I was a lifelong Democrat until about six years ago when I saw progressives who were trying to "save" Democracy subverting Democracy
What those progressives (a misnomer) mean by "saving our Democracy" appears to be nothing other than saving their technocratic power, their bureaucracy by any means, fair or foul. Their machinations have deprived them of any claim to legitimacy but they are either unaware of this or indifferent to it. "Ecrasez l'Infame!"
Defining Trump's mission from his perspective: "Me." Mr. Trump allegedly wants to make America great, but this is only so long as he is perceived as great. Don't get me wrong, a few of his objectives are, in themselves, very good (controlling the border). But fundamentally he's about himself, his legacy, being in the spotlight constantly, etc. His flip-flop on the union illustrates his whim.
Right. Trump is no ideologue or crusader or philosopher king, so there's no reason to expect him to act like any of those things.
With the way Trump immediately capitulated yesterday to arguably the worst union in the country over the dock automation that we desperately need to regain competitiveness with China, with possibly the dumbest excuse for reasoning ever, I think we have our answer.
Maybe there will still be net positives in the end given just how abysmal the Democrats have been the past decade in attacking US dynamism with self inflicted wounds, but it won’t be by better principles on behalf of Trump so much as him just not paying attention.
This is a fairly pessimistic post, and I’m fine with that. I’m still grateful that Trump won, and that DEI is on the defensive. This gives us breathing room. The question I should consider is, “What am I going to do with this breathing room that will improve things in the longterm?”
“However, as N.S. Lyons points out, most of these enemies are in the private sector, especially universities, and many are very well-funded by non-profit giants.“ Most universities are public. See Vedder’s article, “There Are Really Almost No Truly Private Universities.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2018/04/08/there-are-really-almost-no-truly-private-universities/
"I have my doubts that Mr. Trump is up for carrying out the crusade that Lyons and others are hoping for."
I'm much more pessimistic than you are. I've never believed that Trump has much in the way of concrete objectives, and even less appreciation for how to use the government bureaucracy to accomplish things. He does seem to be recruiting some people with objectives, but most of them have little or no experience in working in large organizations. He may do less damage than Harris would have done, but I don't expect much in the way of achievements.
A laudatory change would be that no one in the executive branch has job protection of any kind- when the President changes he or she has the power to replace every single member that works for the executive branch.
"all government jobs were filled by partisans, giving them out to their friends and family."
And what is different today?
Remember, there was a reason for creation of the civil service - all government jobs were filled by partisans, giving them out to their friends and family. This was not only policy makers and implementers - there weren't very many policies to make or implement through the federal bureaucracy. It included ladies sweeping the floors, men delivering the mail, collectors of taxes, etc. A much bigger problem at the state and municipal level, where it included police, building inspectors, road construction, you name it.
I've often wondered how differently things would have turned out if the civil service had never been invented. I don't think things would be any worse as far as the deep state goes, but would they be any better? It would probably be just a different kind of untameable swamp.
We could have more hope if Musk and Ramaswamy were more interested in reforming regulations than in reducing expenditures.
Whenever I see “liberalism” bandied about, I think of the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/#ClaLib and wonder. But then great minds like Furedi, Rufo, and Lyons pull me back to reality. Pragmatically, they seem to be asking the same question, “how?” Or as the early Russian radicals might have phrased it “What is to be done?”
Furedi gets to the root of the matter:
“It is important to understand that the politicisation of the Courts violates a founding principle of democracy – liberal democracy, social democracy, Christian democracy are founded upon the principal that law and politics must be kept as far from each other as possible. What we have today is not simply the case of a traditional judicial over-reach but a situation where the rule of law is systematically deployed to serve political end.” The new administration will be in an all out war with the lawfarists. And the lawfarists are well supplied with ambiguous statutory ammunition to delay and thwart any attempt at progress.
How to win? Repeal the statutes.
Rufo’s head is in the right place and there is nothing wrong with his proposed strategy, however, it seems like just mowing the lawn to make the weeds less obvious. The weeds have to be pulled out by the roots. I would suggest considering adding to his strategy issuing an OMB requirement for each government agency or other body to submit a list of each of the statutes under which the agency has ever promulgated a regulation and the most significant regulations issued under each. The first budget the administration presents to Congress should include legislative proposals to repeal the underlying statute for every harmful regulation. No deregulation without statutory repeals or else it is all just temporary and the lawfarists still have their weapons to fight progress.
Lyons gets to the practicality of it all. I must admit I am dismayed when I see Vivek and Joni Ernst prattling on about all the stupid research grants awarded. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. Democratic Senator William Proxmire highlighted such waste for decades with his “Golden Fleece” awards and it never did a lick of good. I’ll be impressed when DOGE comes up a proposal to abolish the underlying statute that enabled those awards. Perhaps it is worthwhile to propose and enact legislative requirements for automatic statutory and regulatory expiry dates. At least no new regulation should be promulgated without an expiry date. The real work is going to be done in Congress. And that is where JD Vance needs to step up and prove himself. If Vance is unable to get Congress to move on a repeal agenda, then Trump needs to find someone who can make it happen. So far, it is a good sign that Vance is out of the news. He needs to be working quietly across the whole of Congress.
More practically, the upcoming expiry of certain tax provisions offers an opportunity to make radical change in the tax code and an opportunity to undertake massive deregulation via statutory repeal. There have been a lot of proposals floating around. For my two cents, just repealing the entire US tax code and replacing it with an adaptation of Singapore’s Goods and Services Tax would be ideal. And it would effectively serve the same purpose as the proposed tariff hikes.
So, “revive liberty” seems a bit nebulous as a measure of success. I think its pretty easy to see where that is going: Trump is not ideologically pure and will be a disappointment regardless. If I, on the other hand, had to suggest just one measure of whether Trump is succeeding or not, it would be real median household income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N Maybe there is a better single economic indicator of the nation’s welfare? If so, I would gladly use that.
Well then you may by interested in a recent Cato white paper that provides a good start on a list of statutes to repeal: https://www.cato.org/white-paper/cato-institute-report-department-government-efficiency-doge#reform-tax-treatment-health-care. It is a bit timid and one might argue with some of the specifics but it does at least take baby steps in the right direction. The administration could do worse, and probably will, than to use it as the base of a government reform agenda
Behold! The hidden challenge that makes this all more difficult is that people who do not have intensive training in statistics are *terrible* at properly making good decisions where the probability of an adverse outcome is low, but the consequences of that adverse outcome are high.
At the same time, the intensively trained statisticians are *terrible* at properly making decisions on a human's behalf when the probability of success is low, even if the consequences of that successful outcome are extremely positive.
Any discussion of Liberalism with engaging with Communitarianism is necessarily superficial and will fail to engage with the relevant issues substantively.
Super post.
Liberalism has failed, a bit, because its goal of individual freedom is not constrained by liberalism— it’s been hugely and wonderfully successful in Christian cultures. Because the Christian culture, Under God, has put constraints on individual behavior so as allow maximum freedom in actions that do not cause social harm. Harm to society.
Along with competition, adversarial Justice, and scientific disputes, a key pillar of Liberalism is Rule of Law. Like Democrats so often mentioned BUT those Dem elites so often flagrantly violated. It was Christian culture, not Liberalism, that constrained Expressive Individualism (phrase from Robbie George, the only known conservative professor at Princeton.)
Kling says something like “The problem is not that communism fails. It is that the people who claim to be communists, once in power, lose their taste for communism.” Most Americans know that this is dumb, tho a huge number of professors, even today, would claim that “real communism hasn’t been tried.” Kling is sort of claiming real Liberalism hasn’t been tried, and many Europeans call themselves Classical Liberals rather than the US term Libertarian. (As I was in the 80s).
The Liberal project of replacing a Culture, like our Christian culture, with thousands of laws & regulations, is a failure. If Liberals in power lose their taste for Liberalism, as they have in most OECD countries, then it shows that Liberalism fails. Because of big government, full of Liberals, preferring their own individual agenda rather than the jobs they were given power to do.
The Principal Agent problem. Which Milei in Argentina is hugely reducing by getting rid of many govt bureaucrats and regulations. So there’s hope for Trump, Musk, & Ramaswamy. Especially if they get govt employees to be limited to 8 years in govt, except the military.
I think your notion of liberalism is too broad. Not all questions of law are supposed to be open to change by the democratic process; that's why we have a constitution and a bill of rights. But since the New Deal, important parts of the Constitution are being disobeyed with impunity. This must stop even if it brings down the country to stop it.
What's wrong is, approximately, the very existence of administrative law and the jobs of the so-called experts who administer it.
Trump is patriots' last, best hope to get this problem fixed permanently. If he can't, then we're hosed unless and until the right dictator saves us.
Liberals, meaning classical liberals, were largely in charge in the US for more than 150 years until the Depression. Acemoglu should recognize that those liberals governed successfully. The New Deal brought a different cast of characters, who I would call "progressives."
My question is: does a truly liberal democracy always risk the pitfalls of a Depression and/or progressive takeover?
The Progressives began after the Civil War showed government could do what ordinary people hadn't done -- end slavery. It really got going in the 1880s. Railroad regulation, meat packers, occupational licensing, especially doctors and lawyers, but also plumbers and other fields. The Fed and income tax in 1913, the steel navy revival in the 1880s, lots and lots of statists grabbing for power.
Let me re-state my thought: the Progressives-statists became dominant with the New Deal and that was a decisive turning point. The Harding-Coolidge-Hoover administrations reversed much of Wilson's progressive policies, such as railroad nationalization.